Summary: Considering the growth of GNU/Linux and considering the growing threat to our freedom (TPM, UEFI 'secure boot', surveillance down to the level of keystrokes) we need to accelerate or amplify GNU/Linux advocacy

THE concept of software freedom is not difficult to understand. The underlying facts aren't hard to grasp. The corporate (as in large corporations-owned) media makes it sound overcomplicated in the same way it keeps lecturing people about GNU/Linux being "too difficult" and "hard to use". They say it's "just for geeks"... (of course many people who write that never even bothered trying GNU/Linux for themselves, so they just relay what they heard somewhere else in corporate media)

GNU/Linux is indeed very powerful, but it is powerful for those who need extra power and prefer to open up a terminal; not because it's the only way to get things done but because in certain situations/scenarios it's the fastest (most expressive) way to get work done...

I've been using GNU/Linux for over 2 decades because it was powerful, not because I truly understood software freedom. My introduction to the concepts set forth by GNU back in the 1980s came much later (around 2001) and prior to monopolistic takeover of "Linux" (nowadays we see that in the Linux Foundation) we could say the word "Linux" to sort of signify or imply freedom -- be it freedom from monopoly (back then Windows was a lot harder to avoid) or freedom from proprietary software (back then privacy aspects weren't of high importance just yet).

As software takes over more and more facets of people's lives (even "on the go" or "in the car") and large vendors turn to business models like rental (DRM among other things), planned obsolescence (they like it when things break down often and people lack the ability/right to repair their own devices) and mass surveillance we must speed up the migration -- one might call it escape -- to Free (as in freedom-respecting) software.

Up until 2006 or thereabouts I focused almost solely on GNU/Linux advocacy (after that the focus on elimination of software patents grew, not to mention confronting the threats of Microsoft infiltration -- not a new threat at all!). In the coming months it seems likely that we'll revisit GNU/Linux advocacy with focus on GNU because GNU means software freedom. Linux? Not as much... ⬆